Page 3 of Desired

She'd been five the last time she stood in this kitchen, and she'd have sworn she kept nothing from before her parents' divorce, and then she walked in and the smell was still there, coffee gone into the walls and woodsmoke and something underneath that was just him, and her knees informed her they needed a chair. She kept waiting for the place to feel like a stranger's house. It wouldn't do her the courtesy. The kitchen table had a burn mark shaped like a comma that her hand knew before her head did. There was a stool by the counter that looked like it existed so a small girl could reach the sink. Twenty-two years, and the house had been sitting out here the whole time, holding her seat.

Three weeks ago she'd been in Denver, in a sublet, her mother a year gone and the boxes of her things still taped shut because opening them was a job Lauren kept not being ready for, when a lawyer named Greene called from Texas and told her that her grandfather had died, and that the ranch was hers. All of it. A hundred and sixty acres, the house, the water rights, the mineral rights, words she wrote down on the back of an envelope like they were in a language she'd have time to learn. He never reached out, her grandfather. Not a card, not a call, not once in all the years after her parents tore each other apart and her mother took her north and the ranch fell off the map of her life like a road that washed out. But he kept her in the will the whole time. He never changed it.

Then, at the end of the call, Greene asked, in the gentle tone of a man confirming a known fact, what she wanted done with her father's effects, the ones the county had been holding all this time.

She made him say it twice.

Her father died when she was seven. Two years after the divorce, while she was still learning cursive, and in twenty years not one adult in her life decided she should know. Her mother knew. Her mother spent ten years dying by inches, braver than anybody should ever have to be, and Lauren held her hand through every last one of those inches and buried her last fall, and her mother passed still holding that back. She'd been furious for about a day. Then the fury fell through some floor inside her and landed where everything else was, in the room where she kept the flower shop and the chain store's regional manager with his beautiful teeth, smiling while he told her they'd be price-matching, and the last box she carried out of her own storefront. Loss didn't surprise her anymore. It just kept finding new doors to come in through.

There were people in Denver who would've helped, if she'd asked. Vendors she'd traded with for a decade, the couple who ran the bakery beside the shop, a phone full of numbers that still answered. She'd let every one of them drift while her mother was dying, one unanswered coffee at a time, because needing people had only ever been another way to lose them.

His closet still had his shirts in it. Flannel work shirts washed down to nothing, soft as an old quilt, and on the second day she'd pulled one on to paint in because her own clothes were made for a woman with a different life, and she'd been wearing them ever since. She didn't look at why too closely.

A church committee from town left a welcome bouquet on the porch her second morning, carnations in a foil sleeve, and it died on the kitchen counter where she set it down, and she carried it out to the burn pile without ever putting it in water.

The plan, at least, was simple, and she said it to herself while she scrubbed like a woman saying a rosary. Clean it up. Patch what showed. Call the realtor in Midland whose sign she kept passing on the highway, list the place after the holidays, sign whatever wanted signing, and be somewhere else by spring. She was good at somewhere else. It was the one thing her whole life had trained her for.

The gate had other ideas.

The front gate hung off its top hinge like a drunk off a doorframe, and every trip to town she'd had to drag it open through the dirt both ways, and this morning, standing in her grandfather's shirt with rust already on her hands, Lauren declared war.

It went about as well as everything else had been going. The gate was iron, older than anybody left alive to ask, and heavier than sin, and the trick, as far as she could work out, was to lift the whole thing level and drop the bottom hinge back over its pin, which would have been easy if she were a forklift. She got it up twice. She lost it twice. The third time she wrapped both arms around the top rail and set her whole weight against it and told it, in detail and at volume, everything that was wrong with it, its manufacture, its character, and its mother, and the gate listened to all of it and then dropped off the pin with a screech of tired iron and came down across her foot.

The word she said would have gotten her marched out of any church in three counties.

"You're losing," said a man's voice behind her.

She came around so fast her hair whipped across her face, a long blond sheet of it, one hand flying up to drag it back, the other still on the gate in case she needed a weapon, and got her first look at him, and her first thought, complete and unhelpful, was oh no.

He stood by the open door of a big truck she hadn't heard arrive, though in fairness a marching band could've arrived during her last round with the gate, and he was ridiculous. Tall, hat pushed back off dark hair, built through the chest and shoulders like men out here apparently just came standard, forearms bare below shoved-up sleeves, a jaw you could open bottles on. Handsome as a billboard, and about as trustworthy. And he was looking at her dead still, not smiling, like she'd knocked something loose in him just by turning around, which made no sense at all, so she disregarded it. Lauren had been alive long enough to know exactly one true thing about men who looked like that: they'd never once in their lives had to be anything else.

Which made it deeply unfair that something low in her stomach sat up anyway, uninvited, at the forearms and the jaw and the easy way he held all that height, and she was furious about it before he'd said ten words. Her body had missed several important staff meetings, apparently. She'd deal with it later.

"Can I help you?" she said, in the voice she used to run pushy vendors out of the shop, the one that meant the answer's no.

"Yeah." He shut the truck door behind him, unhurried, like the afternoon worked for him. "Reckon you can."

"I really can't. Whatever it is, I don't have it, I'm not buying it, and the last owner died, so if you're here for him you're three weeks late."

"I'm here for the gate." The stillness was gone. Somewhere in the middle of her speech one corner of his mouth had started up, like he'd bought a ticket to this and meant to enjoy the whole show.

That stopped her. "The gate?"

"Been watching it hang off that hinge every time I drive past for a week now." He walked toward the fence line, taking his time, his eyes going over the gate and not over her, which she noticed and then was annoyed at herself for noticing. "It's been keeping me up nights."

"It's my gate."

"It surely is. It's also the sorriest thing I see on my drive to town, twice a day, every day of my life. I'm not helping you, I'm helping me." He crouched at the bottom hinge, tipped the dead weight of the iron up with one hand like it was a garden chair, and looked at the pin. "There it is. Pin's bent. You could've stood here lifting till Easter, sweetheart, it was never going back on crooked steel. That's not you losing. That's geometry."

"Don't call me sweetheart."

He glanced up at her, and his eyes were the palest green she had ever seen, and the grin came the rest of the way in, slow, entirely pleased. "No, ma'am."

The ma'am was worse and he knew it, and she watched him know it, and the low thing in her stomach did it again, and she decided she hated him, cleanly and efficiently, a good business decision.

"I've got it from here," she said.

"You don't, though." He said it without any edge at all, a man reading a thermometer, and then he walked back to his truck, and she assumed with real relief that he was leaving, and instead he let down the tailgate and came back with a three-pound hammer and a pair of channel locks. He hadn't asked. He wasn't going to. He crouched at the hinge again and set the locks on the pin, and she stood there holding an entire speech about her not needing rescue with nowhere to put it.